Once again our government has skillfully managed to spend over a trillion dollars with the majority of Americans unaware and locked in a comatose oblivion of mind-numbing entertainment. Please people! Put down your iPhones for sec and pay attention!
A $1.1 trillion spending bill was unceremoniously signed into law this week by our illustrious Spender in Chief, President Obama. Last weekend our Congress managed to avoid a Republican filibuster and throw another bundle of dry kindling on the flames of debt that threaten our nation. Think I’m being dramatic? Take a look at the debt we are accumulating, research what it means, understand what it means and then sit back and consider the implications for your children and grandchildren.
This bill bundles together six of the twelve annual federal spending bills into one massive 1,088 page bill that will finance ten Cabinet-level agencies and help fund the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs in the coming year. The bill, formally known as the Omnibus Fiscal Year 2010 Appropriations Bill (HR 3288) was signed into law on Wednesday. I urge each and every citizen to view this bill and understand how our government is wasting your money. Only the $636 billion defense bill remains to be passed and should make it to the President’s desk by next week bundled with an extension of unemployment benefits. Here is a list of the major provisions and highlights of the spending bill:
$519 billion in routine payments for Medicare and Medicaid
$109.6 billion for veterans programs
$68.2 billion for the Education Department
$41 billion for highway construction.
$18.7 billion for NASA
$7.9 billion for the FBI
$7.3 billion for the 2010 census
$5.1 billion for heating subsidies for low-income people
$3.7 billion for grants to state and local law enforcement
$1.6 billion to subsidize Amtrak
A pay raise for federal employees averaging 2%
In addition, this measure contains over 5,000 earmarks totaling almost $4 billion. Both Democrats and Republicans shamelessly share in the spending as usual. Below is a small sample of the earmarks included in this bill:
$700,000 for a shrimp fishing project in Maryland
$30,000 for the Woodstock Film Festival Youth Initiative
$200,000 for a visitor’s center in a Texas town with a population of about 8,000
$200,000 for the Washington National Opera
$1 million for renovation at the Portsmouth Music Hall
$150,000 for educational programs and exhibitions at the National Building Museum
$400,000 for renovation of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden
$150,000 for exhibits at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundation
$500,000 for exhibits at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium
$2.7 million for the UNL Medical Center, to support surgical operations in space
$292,200 for the elimination of blight in Pennsylvania
$750,000 for exhibits at the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates
$1.6 million for a tram between the Marshall Flight Center and Huntsville Botanical Garden
$655,000 for equipment at the Institute for Irritable Bowel Syndrome Research
$500,000 for intelligent transportation systems in Texas
$250,000 to buy surveillance cameras and deploy them in high-crime areas
Any government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.